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Virtual Dub for me.

Bought a used panasonic svhs deck with svideo out and a time base corrector. Got a used capture card that has svideo in. I used an xfi card I had laying around to capture the audio at 48khz 16 bit (for dvd/ac3). It is possible to get old pro-grade vhs equipment with component outputs and a requisite component in capture device, but this is more money, and I wasn't convinced it would make much difference over a short-run svideo link for low grade standard vhs.

After installing lagarith lossless video codec, I used virtualdub to capture the video/audio output of the vhs player at 720x480. This results in losslessly compressed avi which could be edited in virtualdub to cut out unwanted parts, or it can be loaded in vegas or premier. After the editing, avisynth scripts could optionally be used to filter the noise out. There are gpu enabled plugins for it that work really well for this. After the editing and tweaking of the optional avisynth filters, the footage is probably as good as it will get. Just load up the scripts in virtualdub and reencode back to lagarith again, or if the filtering was skipped, just save out the edits made back to lagarith.

I also wanted my stuff on dvd to hand to non-technical family, so I used hcenc to push the avisynth script to dvd compliant mpeg2. This encoder does an excellent job and takes avisynth scripts as input. For the ac3 audio, I used aften. I used dvdlab to create menus and master the dvd image. I suppose if menus aren't needed, the dvdlab step could be skipped by using dvdauthor, instead, to create the dvd-video file structure and imgburn to burn it to a disc. I do recommend at least placing indexes at regular intervals so that the video can be skipped through with the chapter skip buttons.

This windows-centric method really wasn't that hard and should be doable with OSS equivalents. In terms of cost, the deck I managed to get my hands on cost me $100, and the dvdlab software is cheap (free as in beer and uncrippled if you use it within the first 30 days of installation). Like everything else, it's a cost/benefit ratio calculation, but I really doubt anyone else could've gotten a better result, even with pro-grade hardware.

lagarith
http://lags.leetcode.net/codec...
hanks's mpeg2 encoder

http://hank315.nl/
virtualdub
http://virtualdub.org/

ac3 audio encoder
http://aften.sourceforge.net/

to master the mpeg2/ac3 elementary streams from hcenc and aften into dvd-video
http://dvdauthor.sourceforge.n...

optional, if you want a nice gui for menus and mastering/authoring of a dvd-video compliant image/disc.
http://www.mediachance.com/dvd...

to filter the video. requires learning its scripting syntax, and reasonably powerful gpu if you want to use the gpu accelerated plugins
http://avisynth.nl/index.php/M...

http://www.virtualdub.org/

Why on earth would I want to cram everything into a central repository?

This is a question that's been asked and answered a great many times, if you care to google it. I won't bother going into all of the benefits over centralization... but the biggest one is concurrently running applications: A change in the registry means the applications that access that key get the new value in real time. A file doesn't necessarily do that; Especially if it's been locked for writing.

VirtualDub

Not true the CPU supports use of those registers in 64-bit mode.

At one stage MS was telling programmers not to use the x87 in 64-bit mode but at least according to http://www.virtualdub.org/blog/pivot/entry.php?id=107 they have now declard it's ok for 64-bit user-mode apps to use the x87.

My guess is that the DirectWrite API used for high-quality text rendering depends on changes made in DirectX 10, and I'm guessing one of them is a change in how texture coordinates are interpreted (corner vs. center).

er, no.

perhaps you could create a pair of complementary transforms that don't lose any *more* data when flipped back and forth between each other, but since you're going from (typically) 8-bit numbers to 8-bit numbers, there's loss in precision.

just look at the equations used to perform the transform, it's not too complicated.

see http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.video.mplayer.devel/60699 and http://forums.virtualdub.org/index.php?act=ST&f=5&t=14892&hl=& for some starter material. and yes, i trust people who are actually av programmers more than joe random on slashdot who provides no evidence whatsoever.

and no, your software is most likely NOT storing all intermediate data in 32-bit-per-channel floats.

They may go after him.
Altirra, an 8-bit Atari computer emulator

http://www.virtualdub.org/blog/pivot/entry.php?id=71

http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/file/ntfs/relFrag-c.html

http://www.virtualdub.org/blog/pivot/entry.php?id=71

http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/file/ntfs/relFrag-c.html

( Title after the VirtualDUB developer's excellent post entitled "Just because it is not your fault does not mean it is not your problem"; http://www.virtualdub.org/blog/pivot/entry.php?id=245 )

Here's the thing.. it's not Windows' fault that some random program deletes svchost.exe , just as it isn't Windows' fault that any app or user can delete ntldr (e.g. a badly designed uninstaller).

But it -is- a Windows problem because without those, it won't start up. So why is Windows even allowing these files to be deleted?
I can't delete by hiberfil.sys even though all it is, is pre-allocated space for the hibernation functionality. If I deleted it, nothing would be lost, and upon hibernation it could re-allocate the required space or tell the user the drive is too full and they're SOL. But no - I simply can't delete it. But I -can- delete vital system files.

So, no.. it's not Windows' fault that McAfee's virus scanner deleted the file. It -is- Windows' problem that they -can- in the first place.

I realize that sometimes there may be a need for a 3rd party application to modify a system file - however rare - but then provide this through a proper mechanism that backs up the original and deletes/replaces on reboot only, with the option to deny the change on boot-up. ( System Restore points only go so far as you'll need the Windows CD/DVD in order to get to the restore utility if you can't boot into Windows anymore. It's also an overly complex solution to the simple problem of renaming files on bootup. )

In fact, even some hacks are not that stupid. VirtualDub by Avery Lee still support 98/ME/NT4.

How about a list of more apps?

• Calibre ebook manager
• Last.fm streaming music client
• VLC media player
• CDex CD ripping software
• MusicBrainz Picard for tagging audio files
• Pidgin IM client
• OpenPandora to put Pandora on your desktop and scrobble to Last.fm
• VirtualDub for simple video editing

Anyone else have any good recommendations?

They say that one of the benefits, if not an outright goal, of some Linux distributions is to be a great platform to develop software on.

At one time Linux looked downright competitive as a platform (if certainly not market,) so what happended since 2002?

I do think one thing that would help is for OSS games to have much better tools. Make it easy for people to add assets, build levels and so on. Maybe more people would be willing to do so.

Well, games are not just software. The software is simply there to make the game go.

Perhaps the reason that there are so few (or in some opinions no) good games on Linux is that for developing games, Linux sucks?

Perhaps it is time to admit that OpenGL is a not the only kid on the block and start providing another popular API that other developers want to use?

Perhaps it is time to stop throwing away all that boatload of artwork with each release and start saving anything under a usable license to an appropriate gathering spot?

Perhaps it is time to put down that cumulative-xml2pd-custom-package-colored-pretty-printer patch and answer some basic questions in such a way that new people don't hate us?

What happened to those Open Source game engines that were going to let you MOD your way for WoW 2.0? Perhaps they are still there, waiting for content.

Perhaps what Linux Gaming needs is a little less CompSci and a little more Bachelors of Arts?

You're wrong. But there's actually a lot of "open source" projects that only run on windows. VirtualDub (GPL, hosted at SourceForge) and Google Chrome come to mind.

You don't say if you're running on Windows or Linux or something else. If you are running on Windows, the latest versions of VirtualDub have made big improvements to SMT/SMP encoding.

VirtualDub home
VirtualDub 1.8.1 announcement
VirtualDub downloads

Make sure you grab 1.8.3 - 1.8.1 was pretty good, but had a few teething problems. 1.8.2 has a major regression which is fixed in 1.8.3. The comments in the 1.8.1 announcement contain a few important tips for using the new features (some of which I posted BTW).

The two major new features that would be of interest to you are:

1. You can run all VirtualDub processing in one thread, and the codec in another. This works very well in conjunction with a multi-threaded codec - this one change improved my CPU utilitisation from approx 75% to 95% on my dual-core machines - with an equivalent increase in encoding performance.

2. VD now has simple support for distributed encoding. You can use a shared queue across either multiple instances of VD on a single machine, or across multiple machines (must use UNC paths for multiple machines). Each instance of VD will pick the next job in the queue when it finishes its current job. Instances can be started in slave mode (in which case they will automatically start processing the queue).

I use 3 machines for encoding (all dual-core). With VD 1.8.x I start VD on two of the machines in slave mode, and one in master mode. I add jobs to the queue on the master instance, and the other two instances immediately pick up the new jobs and start encoding. When I've added all the jobs, I then start the master instance working on the job queue.

To achieve a similar effect on your quad-code, start two instances of VD on the same machine - one slave, the other master.

It's not perfect (if you've only got one job, you won't use your maximum capacity) but it has greatly simplified my transcoding tasks, and reduced the time to transcode large numbers of files.

You don't say if you're running on Windows or Linux or something else. If you are running on Windows, the latest versions of VirtualDub have made big improvements to SMT/SMP encoding.

VirtualDub home
VirtualDub 1.8.1 announcement
VirtualDub downloads

Make sure you grab 1.8.3 - 1.8.1 was pretty good, but had a few teething problems. 1.8.2 has a major regression which is fixed in 1.8.3. The comments in the 1.8.1 announcement contain a few important tips for using the new features (some of which I posted BTW).

The two major new features that would be of interest to you are:

1. You can run all VirtualDub processing in one thread, and the codec in another. This works very well in conjunction with a multi-threaded codec - this one change improved my CPU utilitisation from approx 75% to 95% on my dual-core machines - with an equivalent increase in encoding performance.

2. VD now has simple support for distributed encoding. You can use a shared queue across either multiple instances of VD on a single machine, or across multiple machines (must use UNC paths for multiple machines). Each instance of VD will pick the next job in the queue when it finishes its current job. Instances can be started in slave mode (in which case they will automatically start processing the queue).

I use 3 machines for encoding (all dual-core). With VD 1.8.x I start VD on two of the machines in slave mode, and one in master mode. I add jobs to the queue on the master instance, and the other two instances immediately pick up the new jobs and start encoding. When I've added all the jobs, I then start the master instance working on the job queue.

To achieve a similar effect on your quad-code, start two instances of VD on the same machine - one slave, the other master.

It's not perfect (if you've only got one job, you won't use your maximum capacity) but it has greatly simplified my transcoding tasks, and reduced the time to transcode large numbers of files.

In my experience, developers of open source Windows apps, and even shareware or freeware Windows apps, are keenly interested in working to make their app work better on Wine (e.g. 1, 2 for VirtualDub) - open source and freeware developers because they like to make their programs better, shareware because it increases their market. It's worth asking them to declare Wine a supported platform.

In my experience, developers of open source Windows apps, and even shareware or freeware Windows apps, are keenly interested in working to make their app work better on Wine (e.g. 1, 2 for VirtualDub) - open source and freeware developers because they like to make their programs better, shareware because it increases their market. It's worth asking them to declare Wine a supported platform.

I had good results in past years using Virtualdub to capture video from a capture card/video card combo in windows. I used the huffyuv codec to losslessly compress down to about 30GB/hour for DVD resolution capture. There are a lot of free video processing plugins that can really clean up the video and make the encoded video much better (noisy video gets noisier when you encode to mpeg for DVD, particularly at lower bitrates). You can serve the filtered stream directly to your encoder (I used the non-free but very high quality TMPGenc, similarly priced consumer-grade CCE is also excellent). You can also use avisynth to serve and filter on the fly.

I agree with a previous poster about using a high-quality VCR, as they can clean up a noisy tape before it even gets to your computer. I do NOT agree, however on using dedicated A/D conversion hardware. Most consuemr grade products of that type are of poor quality. They're not as bad as in the usb 1.1 days, but in general the high quality converters are expensive. The consumer-level ones are a minefield of poor-quality gimmicks.

Honestly, most people have a pretty high tolerance for noise and video degredation, so you may be well served by a mid-level A/D converter or a DVD recorder. Particularly when you see the learning curve of doing everything with the 'best possibly quality' methods. I did it for fun, but I don't have the time to do it anymore.

If you're looking to learn a lot, check out Videohelp and ignore all the goofballs trying to rip their DVDs.

BTW, can you link me to these "blitter" issues, I am curious.

The problems are numerous, and I haven't compiled a comprehensive list. A.Lee seems to have done a pretty good job with this one here... http://virtualdub.org/blog/pivot/entry.php?id=146# body . I could probably add a few specific bugs to this, but most of them would be nit-picky

BBH

Never used it since it's windows only but VirtualDub is pretty popular. It's GNU GPL too.

For more advices on the subject, just go to doom9 (check the guides) they have everything you need (and more).

I just use FLVSplitter and open them in any DirectShow capable player/editor. WMP or MPC work.

Usually I run them through an AviSynth DirectShowSource() script and then open them in VirtualDub, where I can apply filters, edit, and/or reencode.

yes, there are uncrippled machines that can do what you want (and then some). you probably have one sitting on your desk

if you're running under linux, you've got a couple options. kino (http://www.kinodv.org/ will allow you to capture live raw video (plus sound) from a standard dv camera with an ilink (aka 1394a) connection. it takes a little effort to get setup, but it's worth it. you'll then want to use ffmpeg to re-encode the files so that they're less huge and then save the encoded version.

if you have analog cameras, a $50 capture card (we use ati's all-in-wonder) can act as a frame grabber --- it may take a little finagling to get the sound working, but once it's all hooked up you should be good to go. use xawtv to preview and make sure that everything is behaving as expected, then use ffmpeg to capture the video. make sure you encode at fairly high bit rate and be careful about what combinations of codec and containers you choose (in particular, you probably want to stick to msmpeg4v2 encoded .wmv files if you intend the video to be played back on windows machines). if you've installed something like VLC on the playback machines, you can use more interesting codecs like h264 and still achieve quite impressive playback quality at much lower bitrates.

there are ways to do similar things in windows, although i have much less experience doing so and tend to use developers tools (like graphedit) to put together the directshow filters that will capture video and sound from some source, encode, mux, and then output the file. i'm sure that there are pieces of software out there that can do this. if you have access to some it people, writing your own should be fairly easy (there's a handy book on the subject here: http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Microsoft/dp/073 5618216/sr=8-1/qid=1156903037/ref=pd_bbs_1/104-273 5593-2181510?ie=UTF8)

if you're not inclined to build your own solution, virtualdub http://www.virtualdub.org/ may be able to help you. i haven't used it myself, but it's a pretty widely used app.

the one thing to bear in mind with all these proposed solutions is that you're going to want to make sure you've got fairly big and fast disks and quite a lot of space free. you're also going to want to make sure you've got a reliable backup strategy in place since you no longer have the luxury of the original tapes. if you have any other questions, feel free to email me: (my slashdot user name) 'at' yahoo(dot com).

shouldn't we link to VirtualDub, Sourceforge and its download links a few thousand times?

shouldn't we link to VirtualDub, Sourceforge and its download links a few thousand times?

I love Gimp. Even animations are relatively easy with it.

One thing I'd like to do with it is similar to the way VirtualDub or AviSynth works: saving a script of all the actions I performed on an image/video, that I can then use on other images. You can save curves, but you can't save HSV adjustments that I can tell.

Is there a way to do this with Gimp?

The Google Video Player uses a GVP file to link to the actual video. You can either open that in a text editor and copy out the link to the AVI or load the file in Google Video Player then rename the resulting GVI file in your My Videos folder to AVI.

The videos can then be opened for transcoding in QuickTime Pro or VirtualDub (GPL). They appear to be DivX encoded.

Dictionary:
http://wordweb.info/

Search to replace Windows crippled search, though Desktop search may be better:
http://www.mythicsoft.com/agentransack/

New to me, but have been wanting since before XP:
http://schinagl.priv.at/nt/hardlinkshellext/hardli nkshellext.html Video editing:
http://www.virtualdub.org/
Notepad replacement:
http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/

And of course Firefox and OpenOffice, but those are available for other systems, oh and VideoLan Client (VLC)
For programming: (also available for Linux)
http://www.freebasic.net/

You also may want to check out my learning japanese apps post:
http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=182351&cid =15073257

AviSynth: Frameserver, scriptable non-linear video editing.
VirtualDub/VirtualDubMod: Video capture, linear processing. Use in conjunction with AviSynth.
Isobuster: CD/DVD data recovery
ExactAudioCopy: CD ripping even from badly scratched CDs.

Not a command-line method, but VirtualDub can do that. http://www.virtualdub.org/

It's fairly well known that the NT file system (NTFS) is very bad at avoiding fragmentation, partly due to its allocation strategy of intentionally placing tiny gaps between files -- which is good if those files expand, but bad if they don't. Today, I see this in a fragmentation analysis report of my hard drive:

Fragments 111
File Size 444KB
Name WINDOWS\$NtServicePackUninstall$

The cluster size of the hard drive partition is 4K. This means that NTFS has successfully managed to create a huge directory in which not a single pair of clusters are sequential. I used to think that the Amiga standard file system was bad, but this takes the cake.

Probly is.
You just take a video clip , resize it with Virtualdub http://www.virtualdub.org/ (or convert).

Bang , video clips on a PSP

I use Windows movie maker just because it's what came with my laptop.

Ewww... you're that kind of lazy consumer that helps Microsoft to monopolize market.

For video postprocessing I recommend VirtualDub - very fast, powerful, free, open-source.

Virtual Dub
http://www.virtualdub.org/

I am in the business of converting film to video and feel it should be noted this is quite an expensive undertaking. In addition to cartoons and classics, there are millions of film reels in archives in places such as the Smithsonian, The Library of Congress, your local university and historical societies. I attended the 2004 Association of Moving Image Archivists Conference and found most curators are focusing on preservation of originals, which is a good thing. However, I would love to gain access (video, maybe streaming) to the millions of other movies that will likely never make it out of the vaults due to cost and available funding. Frame by frame restoration may have its place, but I would prefer a scratched up copy (on video). Automated filters could help, here are some freebies (which I do not use) that you could try for yourself with avisynth and virtualdub (all open source projects). http://bag.hotmail.ru/ http://www.avisynth.org/warpenterprises/ http://virtualdub.org/

Many birds do have the ability to mimic sounds - The Australian Lyrebird is one - it's been known to mimic everything from steam whistles to typewriters (complete with the little bell at the end of a line and the sound of the returning carriage) and chainsaws.

I once visited a wildlife park that had a group of aviaries where were kept larger predator-type birds like Kookaburras, Magpies and Butcherbirds. The Butcherbirds and the Magpies could both laugh like the Kookaburras. They would start laughing back whenever the Kookaburras started doing their schtick.

I had a really incredible experience with birds mimicking different sounds, in a geeky kind of way - it all started when I was playing with VirtualDub for the first time. I was mucking about trying all the different compression types, filters and everything and the video I had chosen to play with was a clip of the opening titles of Doctor Who.

The title sequence was from the middle years of Tom Baker's stint as the Doctor. There's a clip of it here.

So, with all fiddling about I was doing, the music for the titles got played a lot that afternoon. I mean a lot. Try one set of filters, with one particular type of compression, process it, play it several times examining the results, change the filters/compressor, process, play another several times, over and over again.

The thing was, when I was playing the results, I tended not to play the whole clip, but just the first 13 seconds or thereabouts. That much of the clip includes the first measure of the melody line - the first four notes.

Some time later, I realised that I could hear what sounded like the music from the clip coming from the garden outside the window. I discovered that two different species of birds had copied different parts of the theme and now my front garden was echoing with the sounds of Doctor Who!

There was a songbird of some sort out there that was repeating the first four notes of the melody line, while a family of Indian Mynas gathered in a grove of trees were mimicking what I can only describe as the the "sparkly" bits - not the bass riff, but the ascending scale of sort of tinkly sounds.

It was really, really cool.

Many birds do have the ability to mimic sounds - The Australian Lyrebird is one - it's been known to mimic everything from steam whistles to typewriters (complete with the little bell at the end of a line and the sound of the returning carriage) and chainsaws.

I once visited a wildlife park that had a group of aviaries where were kept larger predator-type birds like Kookaburras, Magpies and Butcherbirds. The Butcherbirds and the Magpies could both laugh like the Kookaburras. They would start laughing back whenever the Kookaburras started doing their schtick.

I had a really incredible experience with birds mimicking different sounds, in a geeky kind of way - it all started when I was playing with VirtualDub for the first time. I was mucking about trying all the different compression types, filters and everything and the video I had chosen to play with was a clip of the opening titles of Doctor Who.

The title sequence was from the middle years of Tom Baker's stint as the Doctor. There's a clip of it here.

So, with all fiddling about I was doing, the music for the titles got played a lot that afternoon. I mean a lot. Try one set of filters, with one particular type of compression, process it, play it several times examining the results, change the filters/compressor, process, play another several times, over and over again.

The thing was, when I was playing the results, I tended not to play the whole clip, but just the first 13 seconds or thereabouts. That much of the clip includes the first measure of the melody line - the first four notes.

Some time later, I realised that I could hear what sounded like the music from the clip coming from the garden outside the window. I discovered that two different species of birds had copied different parts of the theme and now my front garden was echoing with the sounds of Doctor Who!

There was a songbird out there that was repeating the first four notes of the melody line, while a family of Indian Mynas gathered in a grove of trees were mimicking what I can only describe as the the "sparkly" bits - not the bass riff, but the ascending scale of sort of tinkly sounds.

It was really, really cool.

Microsoft patents ASF media file format, stops reverse engineering.

Avery Lee of VirtualDub fame says (scroll down to the 3/17/2004 news) that MSVC compilers suck horribly at optimizing MMX or SSE code. Check out his examples. I wish I knew assembler so I really could understand how horrible they are.

--grendel drago

I'm pretty sure there are plenty of open source developers who have never touched GNU Make.

you might try these guys.

www.virtualdub.org
www.dscaler.org

And many more.

Open source on windows, OMG it does exist!!!!

Step out of your Linux bubble.

So yeah Xvid is not bad choice at all, I would suggest looking into Quicktime though, since its more ubiquitous.

If you are working with Xvid I would also suggest using vdub for editing/encoding your movies. Check out Doom9 for several guides/faq's and general help for working with these videos.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!

No, really. What real software is out there? Have you actually used any of these apps? Seen anyone use them?

Video Edit Magic Express -- Horrible, lame, and horribly lame iMovie copy. $30 + $10 "eCD" fee

muvee autoProducer 4 -- Same as VEME, but possibly worse. This product is great for creating muvees, but totally inadequate for movies. $70 + $12 CD fee

virtualdub (free) -- it's not a NLE. It's a small specific tool created by a student in his spare time. It might work great*, but it's not an NLE.

Home Movie Editor -- aka Fancy Movies Editor 4.0? Another really cheesy iMovie ripoff. $40. I couldn't tell if a CD was available or not. This will work on 400 Mhz intel hardware, however.

Colorful Movie Editor -- Another iMovie Dupe. There's more dupes here than Timothy has on a bad day. I'm not even certain it even supports DV footage; it's not on the list of supported formats. 29.90$ is the price on the website. Oh, and it's another 29.90$ if you want the DVD software. It's only 10$ to upgrade from the less popular Black & Whiteful Movie Editor.

Movie Tome Editor -- Now you're just making shit up, right? You're going to have to find the link for this one, as I'm nog going to comb through all those listings for a non-existent product.

Gazelle Movie Editor -- This isn't even a video editor! It's for creating small animations.

I'm sure that the actual NLEs above are actually quite useful for the proper purposes. For instance, if I wanted to completely frustrate someone and kill their desire to get into video as a hobby, I might recommend Video Edit Magic Express or Colorful Movie Editor. If they were on older hardware, Fancy Movie Editor would probably do the trick.

Anyway, it's pretty clear that either you know jack squat about editing, or that low cost editors on Windows really really suck. Or maybe both. I've heard that Movie Maker 2 is much improved, but I haven't heard of anyone using it for anything serious. iMovie, on the other hand, has been used for feature length movies, despite the fact that it is designed to be an amateur tool.

* a note on virtual dub. This actually looks like a cool little tool, and I imagine it does what it sets out to do, which is process video files.

Zoom Player http://www.inmatrix.com/
VideoLAN http://www.videolan.org/
VirtualDub http://www.virtualdub.org/

virtualdub
xvid
ogg vorbis

Microsoft Visual C++ studio, where C is for crack.

Remember kids, the first hits always free.

Read the Oldnews in VirtualDub's site.. Go down to the Compairson between VC++6, ++Net2003, and what he wants.

--SNIP--

This, historically, is why I have not bothered to use MMX/SSE/SSE2 compiler intrinsics in VirtualDub -- the code generation sucks. The VC6 processor pack was quite bad and tended to generate about two move instructions for every ALU op; this was improved in VS.NET 2003, but it still isn't able to resolve binary ops of the form A+A correctly, which I use a lot. But there is an even worse problem -- note that the compiler moved MMX ops below the emms instruction. The generated code is wrong!

---end snip---

I had the same problem as you a while ago, and spent ages looking for some good video conversion software. I would recommend Virtualdub - it handles loads of formats intelligently and I've never had a problem with it. Head over to virtualdub.orgto get it.
-Ashton

Writing a script for Virtual Dub would do the trick. Just have it mark 30sec and extract with a numerical filename. Implementing the "randomness" might be a bit of a chore.

Virtual Dub script

One thing it could be very handy for is compression. Video compression is, of course, the first thing that springs to mind, but I guess other types of compression could work too, as long as there is a data path back out of the GPU, to the hard drive or wherever else you want that compressed data to go.

For applications like that, the back channel isn't that much of an issue, because the data coming out of the process is so very much smaller, ie - a lot of data is being thrown away in the GPU

Conversely, on the way in, the data is big. I capture video at 922x576, 25 fps from a dedicated TV card using Huffyuv - a lossless codec, and I get about 7.3 MB per second of data going into the capture file. That works out to about half a gig per minute. If I was to use no compression, it balloons out to about 25 MB/sec

Then I use VirtualDub to run it through a filter or two, resize it with a biCubic transfer and compress it with xVid - With a 1 Gig Duron, the data's going in at about 750 KB per second, getting processed at about 1.8 frames per second and then going back out at (get this) 50 BYTES per second.

If, instead my graphic card could up that by a factor of fifty rather than just sitting there (mostly) idle, I think it'd be great - no more waiting an HOUR to render down a 4-minute clip. If , instead of going TV-card->processor->hard drive it went TV-card->GPU(compress)->processor(filter)->hard drive, the recording could be done all in one hit.

By the way - I can get an hour's worth of video into just under 75 MB and it's still quite watchable - About par with slightly older VHS tapes.